Big Water Film Festival - Bay Theater - Ashland - Wisconsin

14th Annual Festival Free and Online Starting January 7, 2022
See our News section below for more information
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This Year’s Films

Our virtual festival is ready to go, starting on January 7, 2022, with a weekly roll-out of about two hours worth of films every Friday for eight weeks.  All screenings are free this year (although donations will be gratefully accepted).  Make sure you like or follow us on Facebook to get notifications about our weekly film releases, or simply return to this website every week. Once released, almost all of our films will be available for viewing until March 6, 2022.  For our Welcome page and general information, click here. For our Film Guide, click here. For our Schedule, click here.

Sponsorship

Thank you to all our businesses and individuals who have sponsored us in past years!  We are not actively seeking sponsors this year, but we will still have expenses.  If you are able to help, we would definitely appreciate your financial support.  For more information on sponsorships, please click here.  Please see more in the "News" section, below.

Volunteer

Since we are not having an in-person Festival this year, we don't need volunteers this year. But we'd love to have you volunteer for the November, 2022 Festival.  To put your name on our volunteer list, please click here. We'll get in touch with you.  It's fun to volunteer at BWFF, and you get to see free films!  Please see more in "News," below.

Want to submit a film?

Film submissions for 2021 are now closed.  To see about submitting a film for the 15th Big Water Film Festival in November, 2022, please go to our FilmFreeway listing by clicking here.  We will open the site for submittals early in 2022.  Our Film Freeway site has more information.

News

We’re going virtual this time around.

The 14th BWFF will be online starting January 7, 2022.  The BWFF Committee feels that the COVID risk is still too great to allow us to safely have an in-person festival.  While vaccination rates in our area are high, so are infections and hospitalizations.  So let’s all be smart and safe and settle in for some good movie viewing at home this winter.

You can view the listings for the 35 films in our Festival right now.  Then, starting in January, we will make available for viewing an evening’s worth of films each week.  (But you won’t have to watch them all in one evening if you want to spread them out.) We’ll post information on Facebook about the films we are releasing each week.  It will all be free– a way for Big Water to say “thank you” to our community for the sacrifices that you have made during the COVID pandemic.  (Running an on-line festival turns out to not be cheap– so any donations you would like to make will be gratefully accepted.  You can do that buy clicking the button at the top of this page or when you register to watch the films.)

We’ve got films from eleven different countries represented in our line-up, shorts and features, funny films, sad films, films to make you think, films that will leave you feeling good.  We think you will really enjoy this year’s Festival.

Make sure you have “liked” us or are following us on Facebook in order to get notifications of our weekly postings.

Later in the year we’ll announce the winners in all of our film categories.  You will get to vote online for the Audience Favorite award- a ballot will appear after you’ve watched the film and you simply have to rate it 1 through 4– just like we do in the theater.

We really do hope that for the 15th Big Water Film Festival we will all be able to gather again with friends to watch films and meet the filmmakers who made them, but until then we hope you enjoy this year’s films.